high speed to the very border of the white spot, at least. More probably they should have entered the white-covered area filled with a mild curiosity as to what made it so white. And of course the white spot—the horror, the protaean protoplasm of which it was composed—would have engulfed them. But the car stopped. And the white spot was intelligent.

Twenty minutes after the first crackling impact of a heat-beam in the valley, Borden was out of the ground car and moving carefully to peer around a rocky column at the white spot.

Its appearance had changed. There was a rise in the ground level at the edge of the white spot now. The stuff which was the creature itself—which Ellen had aptly called a living jelly—had flowed from other places to form a hillock there. Borden regarded it with suspicion. Obviously, it could send out pseudopods. Amoebae can do that, and he had just seen this thing form a sun-ray projector of itself.

But Borden was not aware of the possibilities of a really protaean substance to take any form it desires.

He saw the pseudopod start out. He was astounded. It did not thrust out. The hillock, the raised-up ground level, suddenly sped out along the highway with an incredible swiftness. He regarded it with a shock that was almost paralyzing.

But not quite. He fled to the car, leaped into it, and sent it racing down the highway at the topmost speed he could coax from it. His face was gray and sweating. His hands shook.

Ellen gasped, "What, Dee? What's happened?"

"The beast," said Borden in an icy voice. "It's after us."

Ellen stared back. And she saw the tip-end of the white-spot's pseudopod as it came racing into the end of the valley through which the highway ran. It was a fifty-foot, shapeless blob of glistening, translucent horror. And it did not thrust out from the parent body. It laid down a carpet of its own substance over which its fifty-foot mass slid swiftly.

An exact, if unimpressive, analogy would be a cake of wet soap, or a mass of grease, sliding over a space it lubricated with its own substance as it flowed, leaving a contact with its starting point as a thin film behind. Or it could be likened to a roll of carpet, speeding forward as it unrolled.

A hillock of glistening jelly, the height of a five-story building, plunged into the valley at forty miles 

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